Environment

For our weekly “Ideas on Europe” editorial by UACES, the University Association for European Studies, we welcome Baris Celik, from the University of Surrey, in the United Kingdom.

by Bruno Luciano and Cairo Junqueira This article is based on research presented at the UACES Graduate Forum Research Conference 2021 (17-18 June, online)   The European Union (EU) and the Southern Common Market (Mercosur) reached an ‘agreement in principle’ in June 2019 for an Interregional Association, after more than thirty years of negotiations. Although a political […]

Analyses of EU transparency traditionally focus on its legal development with little attention to informality. In such accounts, the Council of the EU is routinely understood as an obstructionist force blocking the expansion of transparency, only to be strong-armed into concessions by external pressure. However, in the Environment Council, a formation of the Council of […]

Greenhouse gas monitoring – and increasingly climate policy monitoring, meaning the continuous tracking of policies with indicators – has existed since the early 1990s – and is thus a long-standing practice. For a long time, most people thought it to be a very technical exercise of low politics, but our new work demonstrates that this […]

The EU is facing a key challenge in climate and energy governance. It has agreed to address climate change under the Paris Agreement, and put forward increasingly ambitious policy targets for 2020, 2030 and 2050. However, it is increasingly struggling to fulfil them. The European Green Deal and the proposed European Climate Law reinforce the […]

On 30 October 2019, the European Court of Auditors (ECA) published its Work Programme for the year 2020, listing all the upcoming priorities, main challenges and key concerns for the EU’s finances. The 2020 Work Programme covers a wide range of areas and related problems the EU is currently facing, among them: the sustainable use of natural resources, migration, […]

Criticisms directed at the European Union (EU) and its institutions over the past decade have often been interpreted as a sign of fundamental weakness. However, using the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) as an example, Claire Godet argues that contestation should not be seen as a sign of failure, but rather as an opportunity for […]

The foundation, on 13 January 1980 in Karlsruhe, of a nation-wide ecological party in West Germany came as a surprise. Not the idea itself: the time was ripe for creating a strong political movement based on environmental concerns, frustration with representative democracy, and radically pacifist convictions in the middle of the Cold War arms race. […]

The school strikes and new environmental social movements have raised awareness of climate change and pushed it higher up on the political agenda. In some countries, it has changed public opinion, for example in Denmark where climate change was the main topic in the Spring European and national parliamentary elections. Indeed, the elections are known […]

The United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 25) is currently underway. The success of the Paris Agreement depends on the effective monitoring of climate policy measures. Political scientists at TU Darmstadt explain in a new study what it takes to achieve this. The signatories of the 2015 Paris Agreement not only agreed to limit global […]